Quite a Reunion

Heroes Remember

Quite a Reunion

Transcript

When I got home to Canada we came up on a train up through Oregon, to British Columbia there or to Vancouver and then we took a train from there and we came west, or came east rather and I jumped off the train. Like, I lived south of the Riding Mountain at that time, and I jumped off the, got off the train at Minnedosa and I caught a ride home to Sandy Lake where I thought my wife would be, because I hadn’t heard from her. She didn’t know I was alive or dead or what and I had two children but I knew that she had relatives, cousins, in Sandy Lake. So I hitched a ride to there and they said that she was out at the farm with her mother and dad so they drove me out there with an old Model-T Ford and it was quite a reunion because they didn’t know if I was living or dead.

Description

Mr. Lowe describes his return home to Manitoba.

Garfield Lowe

Garfield Lowe was born in Cobalt, Ontario, on May 6, 1919. His mother died shortly after his birth. His father was a mine manager, but moved to Rackham, Manitoba, and setup a blacksmith shop where Garfield learned the trade from his father. Mr. Lowe was on his own at age 15, and over the next six years did a variety of jobs, including trapping skunks for two dollars a pelt, farm labourer and sawmill worker. During this time he was married and had two children. At the age of 21, he enlisted with the Winnipeg Grenadiers. After completing basic training in Sherbrooke, Quebec, he performed internment camp duty in Kingston, Jamaica, where he received extensive machine gun training (no live fire), but no infantry tactics. In Mr. Lowe’s words, the Grenadiers were reinforced with “rejects” before leaving for Hong Kong. Mr. Lowe spent time in four different camps during his incarceration, and witnessed some horrifying events which haunt him to this day.

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